SOCIETY TODAY

Pornography and the degradation of the individual

David Holbrook

This article, in an only slightly different form, was accepted by the Times some months ago and galley proofs sent to the author. Later, however, Mr Holbrook was given to understand that, in the present climate of opinion, its publication was thought to be 'ludicrous.'

The scene is a house in Wales, in which a film is being shot. In the story, a girl is shut up in a room, and becomes very distressed: afterwards, when she is let out, she has sex, as they say, with a character. The film producer actually shut the girl up, and she became really distressed. So distressed, in fact, that the actor asked to have sex with her could not get an erection. The sex, you see, was 'real'. But the film had to be made, because it costs so much to get all those people together. And so the actor had to goad himself, and the girl had to take it — for the professional business in hand. Another actress who witnessed this horrible degradation of the two persons involved declared she would never make another film with the producer in question. Yet, if Mrs Wistrich has her way, and everything the industry can think up becomes possible, this is the kind of degradation of human beings we, the public, shall be enabled to enjoy. The acceptance of such spectacles inevitably involves us, morally, in the degradation.

The film record of these debasements however, is now distributed throughout the kingdom — and now we have a whole range of powerful individuals from Mr John Trevelyan to Mrs Wistrich, who tell us that adults must be allowed to see such things if they wish. I do not accept this view, and would like to say why, using this incident as an example to analyse. What might be the objections to such an incident?

Firstly, it must be said that we, as the public, do not have any real freedom of choice, where films are concerned. The production of films requires capital investment. The New York Times recently discussed the recent increase of rape as a feature in films, and it was quite clear that this was due to the fact that "rape turns men on" and that it had brought in high returns on investments.

To serve this escalation of industrialised sadism, certain people come forward, who are able to invent such situations, and to persuade people to take part in them.

If art were created locally by "the people" with their resources, this kind of industrialised production of violent fantasies would be neither necessary nor possible. Only because there is a big complex, in which the exploitation of visual sadism is now imminent, do people become willing to take part. They now feel foolish if they try to stand out. In this situation certain disturbed individuals come forward, to seize the opportunity to push their sicknesses out through a mass market. The kind of person who needs to degrade others is well documented in case-histories.

Those who put on sexual acts in a public house are sent to prison. The people making this film, although much crueller and though they will reach a far wider audience, will be defended by critics and high authorities in the industry. Far from being tree' in the face of this huge manipulation, the public finds that any kind of protest is totally futile, and there is no local, democratic control over what the industry shows our children and young people.

Nor are the workers in the industry free. On that set in Wales there were cameramen and wardrobe mistresses. In the cinemas there are usherettes and projectionists.

All these people are involved in doing things that do not really belong to them — for few of them would ever, in the normal course of life, visit a brothel to witness such acts, let alone help show them. This must involve a deep splitting in individuals, between their 'roles' and their real life — an offence to their authenticity and thus to their freedom.

As for the victim herself, she is in performance separated from her self-hood, and so surrenders herself to a strange seduction — an aspect of the dynamics of sexual perversion well analysed by psychoanalysis as in the work of Masud Khan.

She must subject herself to real humiliation and cruelty. We may use on her the maxim of Roger Poole in his discussion of torture in Towards Deep Subjectivity: "to insult the body is to insult the freedom within it." The actor, who must copulate with the girl despite his compassion and distress, must also insult his body. The meaning of that insult is conveyed at large by the film. The objections from psychoanalytical thought are considerable.

For one thing, to behave so is to enter into a schizoid state of dissociation from one's real emotions, and from the meaning of one's body.

In existentialist terms, the actress and actor must perform, in the realm of the most secret and creative dialogue, a violation which is as "inauthentic" as any human act can be. It is a complete denial of human dignity and freedom. As such, it is on a par with torture in Greek prisons, or incarceration in prison camps. In philosophical terms, the actor and actress enact egoistical nihilism — since life has no meaning, and we are all nothing in the end.

Let us, as Max Stirner, the German nihilist said, "not speak of others and their value . . . the other — my Food! Let us regard others as fit only for use — means and organs." In watching such an act of cruel debasement, the audience is being taught this egoistical nihilism as a way of life. This is why adults must not be free to indulge at liberty in such films. They reduce man to a meaningless, functional organism — in whose life there is no value or significance. But there are other objections. To persuade people to do such things, in the name of art, is to deprave and corrupt them.

When I objected some years ago to copulation on the stage in a letter to the New Statesman Mr Hugh Jenkins, MP, suggested I had been deceived by clever simulation. But today it is real, and not only real, but sadistic.

As a student of the psychology of culture, poet and author of a number of studies on the arts, I can see no justification whatever, in any responsible theory of art, for the portrayal of sexual acts on screen or stage. I believe they should be forbidden, because the audience cannot respond to them in such a way as to be still within the control of the artist's purpose.

I believe that such scenes as the above, in fact, teach the audience, implicitly, that our most creative acts can be reduced to meaninglessness, and that, like public whipping, human beings can be reduced to contemptible objects, merely there to be exploited for our satisfaction. If the people are educated to adopt such attitudes, civilised life and politics will become impossible.

What was enacted in that house in Wales was a hostile victimisation such as belongs to hate. "There is always a victim — no victim, no pornography". The clever way in which the pornography explosion has been linked to civil rights and 'freedom' has obscured the underlying fact that what is being claimed is the freedom to hate, such as we deny over racism.

Yet the effect could be to damage the arts, for such scenes breed in audiences expectations which could make them unable to respond to symbolism itself.

This may be explained in terms of the difference established in psychoanalysis between creative symbolising and "acting out". Desperately ill mental patients "act out," by making their infantile fantasies into actual events. Such sex films enact in this way primitive infantile fantasies of parental sex. In the infant these are both deeply anxious and curious, and cruel — because the infant fears the hunger in sex will eat him up, and he is hostile, in self-defence. The trouble is that we can all be pushed back to such paranoid-schizoid hate, to solve our anxieties and fears. Must we be 'free" to be exploited at this level? (By contrast, eroticism helps us to find "the significant other" and become capable of love.) Literal sex films which regress to infantile sadistic fantasy may drive us away from the art, concern, and sense of human values, by which we can realise our human freedom. Can such nihilistic education be totally free'?